————— Vital info
- Portal 2 currently has a release date for American retail and Steam on the 19th, and European retail on the 22nd.
- Portal 2 is a full game compared to the original, there is apparently 4 times the content.
- Has separate Single-player and co-op multiplayer campaigns. The co-op takes place after the singleplayer, and involves 2 more portals, for more people scratching their heads simultaneously.
- Valve has said that the game will not try to strengthen bonds with HL2, however one of the achievements references the Borealis, which may in turn reference the Half life story.
- Portal 2 appears to be on a heavily upgraded source engine, one that certainly looks a lot nicer than the previous one.
- Many new testing objects have been added, such as Faith Plates, launching you high into the air, and Gels, which let you move faster and bounce around.
- You can preorder Portal 2 now from GameStop, Amazon and over Steam.
————— Stuff we all know so shut up about it
Yes, there's a rubix cube version. Minecraft also says "woo facepunch!" We don't need to hear this again.
————— Latest news

No black-hole device is complete without stylish boots to go with them. Landing on your feet has never been easier, considering you now have 50 pounds of metal attached to them.

IGN showed us the start of the Co-Op story, highlighting the amazing return of the orange text monitors.

Further cementing the fact that I am better than all of you, Aperture has proven that robots are more trustworthy than humans. At least for a while.

Gamestop made a shitty video for their shitty skin. Take the smart route and go Amazon.

Aperture's automated marketing tech thought that it'd be a good idea to start bring attention to the fact that you can buy really expensive things from them. It's releasing one each week, four in all. The first one tells you how much you need a panel. Science isn't cheap.

Shown here is the Official Strategy Guide for Portal 2, collectors edition. Desgined with the fact that most of us found out how to beat the game on Youtube, it gives you levels of walkthroughs, from "This'll work, right?" to "Did I take a wrong turn somewhere?" to "WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT DO I EVEN DO JESUS"

At PAX we see the first 10 minutes of the game, along with some early 1900s chambers and Cave Johnson. Wii60 also forgot to get us all shirts.

Intel's Razor controller is supported fully by the source engine, which is pretty cool. Though there hasn't been word from Valve on whether they'll integrate the PS3 motion controller, it may make an appearance in an update.

Well, it sounds pretty obvious: E3 was only a few months away, and the last finding, at the GDC conference, said "SUSPEND UNTIL E.E.E."...

[release]A Valve executive said that the Portal ARG was created by the game's designers as a way to extend the story and there are some nuggets that still haven't been discovered.

Speaking at a star-studded panel on connectivity in games at this year's GDC, Jason Holtman, director of business development and legal affairs at Valve, revealed that there was no marketing team behind the Portal 2 ARG. It was made by the design team on the game and was an effective way to extend the game world.

"I had nothing to do with it, which I think was really important," Holtman said. "The genesis for the idea came from the people who were working on the game. They were thinking about the people who consumed Portal. They thought about it as part of the game. They thought about it as this experience where you're going out and talking about the game's world." There was not a marketing team working on it and separate team on the game. The designers really thought of it as an extension of the Portal universe.

Holtman said that was ultimately why it was so successful. "We had 2 million forum views on that thread over the course of 8 hours trying to solve that puzzle," he said.

He also mentioned an interesting nugget about the change to the end of Portal that went live last week. "We actually didn't decide to make that change to the original Portal until a few days before it went live," he said. Holtman pointed out that was a benefit to the open PC platform. Valve wouldn't have been able to push that change out so quickly to an Xbox or PS3 game.

Unfortunately, Holtman was not able to tell any hints or secrets when I asked him during the Q&A session. But he did think that there is more out there to discover.

"Some of it's been resolved. You never know," he said.[/release]

————— Portal ARG

This is pretty old now, so for those who have either been living in a cave for the last calendar year or simply haven't been introduced to Portal or Valve, here is a rundown of what happened. OH SHI- IT'S BACK UP

March 1st 2010

A mysterious update is released for portal, named 'Transmission Received.' This creates a huge buzz among the community as the struggle to make out what has happened. Eventually though, it was found that radios had been scattered throughout portal that all, when brought to a specific area, played out either Morse code or SSTV, a way of transmitting pictures through sound. Here is what was found.

The SSTV images showed a set of numbers that turned out to be a BBS login code (BBS stands for Bulletin Board system, or a way of sharing data between computers over the internet). The BBS contained memos from Aperture’s former CEO, Cave Johnson, and ASCII pictures of strange objects and symbols, of which can be found below.

At this point there was a lot of wild speculation as to what it could all mean, and what it was pointing at, until the next update came up a couple of days later.

March 3rd 2010

Portal was updated for a second time, this time changing the ending from simply fading out to this:

Also added was a load of new info to the BBS, including a progress bar that was slowly rising.

March 5th 2010

The progress bar fills, and then GameInformer and Valve announce Portal 2. GameInformer also announce that they will be releasing new pieces of information every few days until April 1st, which are found below.
• April Cover revealed, Portal 2 announced
• From Narbacular Drop to Portal
• Opening The Portal: Exploring The Game's Development
• Writer's Block: Portal 2 Writers Roundtable
• Portal’s Minstrels: An Interview With The Men Behind The Music
• Thinking With Portals: Making A Portal 2 Test Chamber
• Meet the Portal 2 team
• Redesigning Portal: Valve’s Artist Speaks
• Aperture Science: A History
• Special Edition Podcast: Portal 2
• Valve Studio Tour
• Let there be cake
• Art gallery

Also found in the GameInformer issue covering Portal 2 and the articles were lots of the pictures that were in the BBS code, shown below.